steve reich - biography


3. Come Out - Phasing

Further tape loop experiments led to Come Out (1966), another phased tape loop piece based on a recording of the voice of Daniel Hamm, a member of the Harlem Six (a group of black teens who had been arrested and brutalised by police during the tension-filled '60's). The piece begins with Hamm's entire quote about how he convinced the police he needed medical attention: "I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them." This time, Reich uses more words, zeroing in on "come out to show them," but uses a similar phasing technique to the one developed in It's Gonna Rain.

Reich soon grew disinterested with purely mechanical, tape-driven music. After some experiments with avant-garde noise music (eg. Pendulum Music (1968), a piece for microphones suspended and left to swing pendulum-like over amplifiers tuned to feed back against them, creating a miasma of chirping, gradually lengthening feedback notes), Reich decided to apply the principles of his phasing process to live performers. He recorded himself playing a simple set of notes on the piano, looped it in playback, and attempted to play by himself on the piano what would have been a second, gradually-out-of-phase tape loop's job. When he found that he could repeat the phasing process with a bit of practice, he recruited a second piano player to take the place of the orginal tape loop, thereby removing the tape entirely and letting the slight discrepencies of human performance contribute to the rhythm of the piece.

This discovery led to a string of breakthrough compositions, Piano Phase (1967), Violin Phase (1967) and Four Organs (1970). These quintessential Minimalist pieces explored the phasing process using both ensembles of purely human musicians (Piano Phase, Four Organs) and human players accompanied by tape recordings (Violin Phase). As with most Minimalist music, public reaction was mixed, and the legend of the premiere of Four Organs has it that an elderly woman banged her fist on the stage behind the conductor, begging them to stop, while another audience member shouted out "All right--I'll confess!"